nakedjen

History repeats unless we do something

A whole lot of things for you to read because other people are writing far better than I can at the moment.

Food as a form of Protest and Justice for all.

The consequences of this uprising are too many to count. The case that the police bring danger, escalation, and expense to many situations rather than peace and resolution is now far more widely accepted.

One reason the movement has grown so quickly is the ease with which New York’s streets and sidewalks can be navigated right now. 

“History repeats,” Marty told me. “Unless we do something.”

Finally, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the history of Juneteenth, some history for all of us as well as ways White people can show up for Black people not just right now, not just today, but every day. 

I Do Not Want To Forget This...

My heart is wobbly and I'm completely overwhelmed.

Our President dared to just mention George Floyd in a speech at the White House. Not with condolences, mind you, just to puff himself up per usual.

He failed to mention Breonna Taylor, of course. That isn't part of his narrative today. Or Ahmaud Arbery. Why bother? He isn't working or alive or can't possibly vote for him.

There was not a single word about the 110,713 Americans who have died from COVID19. Over 1000 of them just yesterday. A larger percentage of those POC.

Still not a single word of condolence from our President.

Not one word.

Oh, but yes, the ECONOMY. It's bouncing right back.

And wouldn't George Floyd be looking down right now and saying this is a great thing that's happening for our country!

Then...this happened....

And I decided that the best thing for me to do was just to step away from the Internet and walk around the real world and smile behind my mask at everyone I could. The world needs us. To show up. With love.

The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program - May 15, 1967

What We Want Now! What We Believe

To those poor souls who don’t know Black history, the beliefs and desires of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense may seem unreasonable. To Black people, the ten points covered are absolutely essential to survival. We have listened to the riot producing words “these things take time” for 400 years. The Black Panther Party knows what Black people want and need. Black unity and self defense will make these demands a reality.

What We Want

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black community.
2. We want full employment for our people.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the White man of our Black community.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter [of] human beings.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.
6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people.
8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails.
9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities. As defined by the constitution of the United States.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.

What We Believe

1. We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
2. We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the White American business men will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the business men and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as retribution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities: the Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered 6,000,000 Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50,000,000 Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
4. We believe that if the White landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
6. We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
7. We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States gives us a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self defense.
8. We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
9. We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black people will receive fair trials. The 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all White juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the Black community.
10. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s god entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
    
    
    This post was edited to include a photo of the Black Panthers in Atlanta in June 2020. 
    
    

Love is a Superpower

They said she was just trying to sell books, inexperienced and too full of mystical bullshit.

Yet, Marianne was the one who told us over a year ago that this country desperately needed radical truth-telling about race and that our President was a fascist. 
She was the only candidate that called for reparations, a Department of Peace, and a Department of Children and Youth to address the chronic trauma of millions of children more likely to end up in prison than at high school graduation.  She is also the only candidate who I wholeheartedly supported with my dollars and my time and my boots on the ground.

Our collective voices and our hearts are still stronger than the demonic madness pushing all of us down.  Love is a superpower and all of us have it. 

Keep your foot on the gas. xo

The Burning of Paper Instead of Children ~ Adrienne Rich

I was in danger of verbalizing my 
moral impulses out of existence.
			--Daniel Berrigan, on trial in Baltimore

   1. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and 
his, aged eleven and twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics textbook in the backyard. He has 
forbidden my son to come to his house for a week, and has forbidden his own son to leave the house during that time. 
"The burning of a book," he says, "arouses terrible sensations in me, memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset 
me so much as the idea of burning a book."

Back there: the library, walled
with green Britannicas
Looking again
in Durer's Complete Works
for MELANCOLIA, the baffled woman

the crocodiles in Herodotus
the Book of the Dead
the Trial of Jeanne d'Arc, so blue
I think, It is her color

and they take the book away
because I dream of her too often

love and fear in a house
knowledge of the oppressor
I know it hurts to burn

2. To imagine a time of silence
or few words
a time of chemistry and music

the hollows above your buttocks
traced by my hand
or, hair is like flesh, you said

an age of long silence

relief

from this tongue        this slab of limestone
or reinforced concrete
fanatics and traders
dumped on this coast wildgreen clayred
that breathed once
in signals of smoke
sweep of the wind

knowledge of the oppressor
this is the oppressor's language

yet I need it to talk to you

3. People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence to overcome this suffering. Some of the suffering 
are: a child did not had dinner last night: a child steal because he did not have money to buy it: to hear a mother say 
she do not have money to buy food for her children and to see a child without cloth it will make tears in your eyes.

(the fracture of order
the repair of speech
to overcome this suffering)

4. We lie under the sheet
after making love, speaking
of loneliness
relieved in a book
relived in a book
so on that page
the clot and fissure
of it appears
words of a man
in pain
a naked word
entering the clot
a hand grasping
through bars:

deliverance

What happens between us
has happened for centuries
we know it from literature

still it happens

sexual jealousy
outflung hand
beating bed

dryness of mouth
after panting

there are books that describe all this
and they are useless

You walk into the woods behind a house
there in that country
you find a temple
built eighteen hundred years ago
you enter without knowing
what it is you enter

so it is with us

no one knows what may happen
though the books tell everything

burn the texts         said Artaud

5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our 
failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton's. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but 
we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard 
to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You 
are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in 
Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning. I cannot touch you and 
this is the oppressor's language. 

 

Revolution

I have privilege as a white person because I can do all of these things without thinking twice:
I can go birding (#ChristianCooper)
I can go jogging (#AmaudArbery)
I can relax in the comfort of my own home (#BothemSean and #AtatianaJefferson)
I can ask for help after being in a car crash (#JonathanFerrell and #RenishaMcBride)
I can have a cellphone (#StephonClark)
I can leave a party to get to safety (#JordanEdwards)
I can play loud music (#JordanDavis)
I can sell CDs (#AltonSterling)
I can sleep (#AiyanaJones)
I can walk from the corner store (#MikeBrown)
I can play cops and robbers (#TamirRice)
I can go to church (#Charleston9)
I can walk home with Skittles (#TrayvonMartin)
I can hold a hair brush while leaving my own bachelor party (#SeanBell)
I can party on New Years (#OscarGrant)
I can get a normal traffic ticket (#SandraBland)
I can lawfully carry a weapon (#PhilandoCastile)
I can break down on a public road with car problems (#CoreyJones)
I can shop at Walmart (#JohnCrawford)
I can have a disabled vehicle (#TerrenceCrutcher)
I can read a book in my own car (#KeithScott)
I can be a 10yr old walking with our grandfather (#CliffordGlover)
I can decorate for a party (#ClaudeReese)
I can ask a cop a question (#RandyEvans)
I can cash a check in peace (#YvonneSmallwood)
I can take out my wallet (#AmadouDiallo)
I can run (#WalterScott)
I can breathe (#EricGarner)
I can live (#FreddieGray)
I can sleep in my own bed (#BreonnaTaylor)
I CAN BE ARRESTED WITHOUT THE FEAR OF BEING MURDERED (#GeorgeFloyd)
White privilege is real. Take a minute to consider a Black person’s experience today.
#BlackLivesMatter

Solomon

“Solomon was busy judging others, when it was his personal thoughts that were disrupting the community. His crown slid crooked on his head. He put it straight, but the crown went awry again. Eight times this happened. Finally he began to talk to his headpiece. “Why do you keep tilting over my eyes?” “I have to. When your power loses compassion, I have to show what such a condition looks like.” Immediately Solomon recognized the truth. He knelt and asked forgiveness. The crown centered itself on his crown. When something goes wrong, accuse yourself first. Even the wisdom of Plato or Solomon can wobble and go blind. Listen when your crown reminds you of what makes you cold toward others, as you pamper the greedy energy inside.”

#savemylife

I woke up cocooned in comforters and the weight of a large black labrador this morning. 

I could already hear the traffic from I-15.  Cars and trucks going north and south and east and west.  Enough to make all the noise that cars and trucks make on a Monday morning to allow you to know that life is moving faster than you want it to move and that business is happening and that soon the clear blue skies will be filled with smog again. 

We could see the mountains across the valley and marvelled that we could also see the Great Salt Lake.  That was our prize for sheltering in place.  For staying at home.  For not visiting our friends and for making sure there were six feet between me and between you.  For not driving all the cars. For walks with the dogs.  For checking on our neighbors.  For eating dinner at home and getting to know our families as the humans that they happen to actually be. 

Today, though, the code color is yellow and yellow means go in our part of the world. 

Back to work, back to school, back to the playgrounds and the gyms and the pools and the office and the restaurants and the hair salons and the sporting events.

Back instead of forward.  BACK.  We are going back when we had so many chances to go anywhere else. 

Smog is going to envelop us and our lungs will get heavy with coughs and we'll wonder is it the virus or is it bad air?  Have we ever really cared? 

We won't be able to tell the difference as we sit on patios and eat our pizza and drink our beer and toast that we won the god damn war! 

Won.

Did we?  Did you?  

We only win if we're still alive. 

Transitioning to Greatness

There are some days when I never really get dressed.  

Of course, life before this virus swirled in and stopped all the clocks and created new pathways through the grocery stores and decided that some of our lives were far more valuable than other of our lives kind of looked the way it does for me now, only I thought it was just depression and I did not have a virus to blame for not getting dressed or the ennui of really not wanting to actually walk the dog or get off the couch or actually do much of anything and the only day I ever looked forward to was Wednesday, or that night really when I'd gather with my friends at the bar and play trivia and even then it was only because there was a pin on the calendar marking a point in time that was different than all the other points in time and so it all just wrapped around and around and around and around. 

That was a long sentence. If you made it to this one, I'll fill you in that time now doesn't really seem much different except that I now am aware that the days are even longer...stretched thin with the wanting of something, anything, to make them seem like I might be able to find a pin to pop the ennui and make them seem somehow different?  There's no bar, there's no Wednesday evening gathering to demarcate time and there's no gasping for air laughter or snarky side remarks because we're all too busy trying our best to be kind and gentle with one another since things are different.  Except they're not really different.  But they are different.  

I walk the dog in my pajamas not making any effort at all since there's no reason to make an effort at all and I never showered before but it is even less of a necessity now and I show up at my coffee shop later and later and later because even that doesn't matter anymore.  I show up because I absolutely need to get my daily four shots of espresso and there's no way I'll ever not go but now it doesn't matter to me when I actually get it.   I find myself forgetting to take my vitamins, forgetting to eat, forgetting about time. 


 

I dream of long dusty days.  Where the masks that I wore protected me from dust storms and white-outs I could see coming across the horizon when I chose to wear hot pink holey tights and unicorn short shorts and love goggles and rode my bike into the wind and never felt more alive.  Alive and unafraid and wondering what adventure might greet me at the next corner.  Hugs were free, love had no attachments, gifts showed up just when you needed them most and every single day you were reminded by a stranger, gently, kindly, exactly who you were.  If I tilt my head in just the right way, it is just like right now.  The virus is that stranger here to wake me up. 

In the books that are written about these pandemic times, how will they talk about all of us who just simply gave up while we were transitioning to greatness?  

I Don't Know What It Means

“Whoa, that’s a full rainbow. All the way. Double rainbow. Oh, my God. Double rainbow all the way, it’s so intense, Whoa! Oh my God! Oh my God! What does this mean? Too much. I don’t know what it means.” 

Rest in peace, Hungrybear9562. Your spirit and your magic and your awe always gave me giggles.  You inspired me in so many ways and your hugs (oh the hugs) were some of the most generous.  Thank you for sharing all of you with all of us in such beautiful sweet magnificent heart first head last ways. 

I always hear your voice in all the rainbows, now I will see you in all of them, as well.  

 

Now more than ever, I hope we'll all look into the mirror and look into our souls.  xo